What they’ll really get up to at university
University challenge What you really need to know about your child’s life as a student
They will emerge in three or four years’ time with a degree, if you are lucky, and four binliners of clothes
Yes, they’re finally off to uni! You have spent the last week buying fitted single sheets, mugs, the starter kitchen kit, new socks, new pants, a laundry bag, a lamp, a cookbook. It’s like the back to school moment, without the name labels, plus a whiff of my very first flat. You may dimly remember heading off to university yourself, though not so well that you haven’t chosen to think of this new phase in your children’s lives as something wholesome and grown-up which, when you picture it, looks a bit like the set of Friends mixed up with Cambridge in The Theory of Everything.
Sooner or later you will discover that, au contraire, your pink-cheeked, straight A-scoring darlings are heading off to planet
Skins, from which they will emerge in three or four years’ time with a degree, if you are lucky; a hacking cough; four bin liners of clothes that look like they’ve been liberated from a clothes bank; and an absolute conviction that money is evil and daylight is over-rated. Until then, this is what you really need to know.
Stop buying things for their room in the halls of residence. Every single student turns up with a kettle and a frying pan, and you will never see any of it again. If you are thinking of sending them off with any decent stuff (as opposed to the starter kits made specially for students), don’t. Decency dictates that you buy two towels and a spare set of sheets, but they will only use one. They aren’t changing the sheets.
The charming, wellspoken person in the room next door, who you force them to make friends with on arrival, will later turn out to be called Drez The Dealer.
When you can’t get hold of them for the next three months, at any point in the day earlier than 3pm, it is not because their phones have run out of battery.
When you go to visit them, and they suggest meeting at Byron Burger, it is because their place is the Block C official party pad. They have not put up any of the nice pictures, the rubber plant is lying in a pool of earth under the bed, and the laundry bag is being used for beer storage. You will not know any of this until the end of the first year when it’s time to move them into a house the size of a caravan, that none the less costs the same as a four-star hotel.
They will not take to the food in halls, and will prefer to eat only cereal.
They might use a toasted sandwich maker.
On your first visit, don’t ask them to show you where the library/ lecture halls are. Better not to set yourself up for disappointment.
Boys will stop shaving and cutting their hair professionally (haircutting by friends when blind drunk is a thing); girls will get tattoos, or piercings, or start wearing just one fluffy orange jumper and DMS.
They will start speaking in a slower, more meaningful way, and smiling ironically to themselves.
They may acquire a weird guess-where-i’mfrom accent.
They will announce they have given up TV, but spend an awful lot of time looking at moving images on their laptop.
Having been perfectly happy to do ordinary things, like have a coffee in Peter Jones, they will no longer be happy to have a coffee in Peter Jones.
They will go to black tie dos, but never wear black tie, on principle.
Should they come home with their washing, beware. It is heaving with filters (aka washing machine cloggers), Bic lighters, felt tips, straw.
When they come home, they will suddenly require a double bed. Their spatial awareness will have vanished and they will take up almost literally twice as much room.
Good luck.